


Goodbye (1)

by NervousAsexual



Category: Christian Lore, Original Work
Genre: Purgatory, Roman Catholicism, i have no money and my house is full of fleas for some reason, loosely based on Phil Ochs, please don't sue me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 05:24:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12029067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: When she was a girl her father killed himself and she was left with nothing but unanswered questions. What else could she do, but join the Eternal Bureaucracy of the afterlife?





	Goodbye (1)

She was good her whole life on the off chance she could see him again.

She put all her eggs into that one especially Catholic basket and in the end it did pay off. She was put to work judging the souls of the damned. What a beaurocracy. She'd seen it coming but judging by the many, many republicans who came through her office most other people had not.

She got used to seeing the disoriented souls come straight from purgatory. They all looked dizzy, confused, unused to control over their bodies. Purgatory was more of a stopping place. It was like living in a truck stop, a former sex worker told her, confidentially of course. She went ahead and stamped her book and sent her on to heaven.

There were probably a few more people who went to heaven from her office than from the others. But nobody mentioned it, so she didn't bother trying to change. But there were a lot of politicians, too, who she sent the other way. She was like him in that way, after all. She never tired of watching the looks on their faces as they realized she wasn't joking, that it was true, planned parenthood didn't sell body parts, people did die because of their fucking healthcare bill, people did die because of their war on drugs, people died all the damn time and she saw them here. And now they were going straight to hell.

They always looked smug when she first saw them, knowing that they were good Christians, or at least good enough that Fox News patted their egos. She liked encouraging them, egging them on more and more until they admitted--no, not admitted, bragged, even--about their god-awful laws and regulations. She'd let them fill the room with the steam coming off their putrid pride, and then when they were sure where they were going she'd let them know that, sorry, camel through the eye of a needle, you gotta go below deck.

But wait, they'd cry. That's not fair, they'd wail. I'll do anything, they'd plead. But she was like her dad. She didn't have a spit of sympathy for them.

And so it was fitting when finally, finally, after years and years, he came through her office.

She'd cleared her schedule when she first saw his name written in her book. She needed time to sit in silence with the lights dimmed, thinking about what she was going to say and what she was going to ask. She moved the chairs around in front of her desk. She traded out the one with the wobbly leg for the one that was sturdier but shorter. She didn't want him off-kilter. She wanted him to answer her questions but know that it was different now, that she was in charge now.

Finally the day came and the hour came and she saw him step up to her door. He looked sick still, even in death, nervous. He stopped at the door and examined his reflection in her window. He adjusted the cowboy hat on his head to a different angle. She saw him hiccup and look down at himself. He was still wearing the body he'd had when he left, puffy and bloated and sad. He gave himself a shake and the body changed, years peeling back. Not everybody realized they could do that. This wasn't heaven, it was true, but it was close enough to that perfect world to give them whatever it was they were looking for.

He stopped and looked at himself again. Now he was more like the pictures she'd seen of him in his twenties, not all that different of the picture of him and her from when she was a little girl. In the picture they were sitting on the front porch together. He had his legs crossed and she was imitating him with her chubby little baby legs. He didn't look at the camera but she knew, somehow, that was the age he was trying to present.

"Come in," she said. He jumped--the glass wasn't one way but when the lights were turned down you couldn't see in. He fumbled with the door handle and made his way in.

He walked funny, like his boots pinched his feet. She wondered why he didn't just change them. He had that power, here, at least.

He came up and stood awkwardly behind the chair until she indicated he should sit down. He did so. She let him stew for a while. He sat with his hands lying open, palms up, on his lap. She saw the look that crossed his face when he realized he could change not just his body but his surroundings. His guitar--she knew it was his even though, she realized, she didn't know what the make or model were--materialized from the ether and he settled it onto his lap and held the neck of it against his face and closed his eyes.

"How was your stay?" she asked him.

He glanced up at her, eyelids drooping as if the very little light there was hurt him. He looked back down without a word.

She'd had a speech planned out, a long speech about actions and consequences and then she was going to turn up the lights and reveal who she was. But she couldn't remember a word of it now, even after her hours of prep.

With nothing else to do she turned to her old standby.

"I've been looking through your records," she said. "You lived a decent enough life. Didn't hurt people. Didn't send children off to war."

He glanced up again.

"You weren't a wife beater or a child molester or anything. You even stood up to injustice every now and then."

He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and pressed his cheek against the neck of the guitar.

"And then you went and you threw it away," she said. "You probably could have gotten into heaven, and instead you killed yourself."

His voice was rough from disuse, and lower than she remembered. "I was in a lot of pain."

Oh, I know, she thought. There were a lot of things she knew. A lot of things she wasn't supposed to remember but did. "And what about John Train? Should you be judged for his sins too?"

"Him." There was a bitter note to his voice. "He's one that should go straight to hell. He stole my family. He stole my life."

"He wasn't real."

"I don't want to talk about him."

"Why not? Weren't you him for a good number of months? Why should all that just be wiped from your record?"

He doubled over, sliding his chin down to the shoulder of the guitar. "He killed me."

"You killed yourself."

"What difference does it make? He killed me, I killed him. One of us had to go."

She was honestly glad that it was he who'd made the journey through purgatory, and not John Train. She remembered him too, all too well. She remembered the way he smelled, even now, so many years beyond her death. Like cigarettes and alcohol and body odor. He'd been angry, always, angry at every one and everything and he had terrified her. Her father had been angry as well, but never as violently as John Train.

"He hurt people."

"I know he hurt people. He hurt me."

"He was you."

He dug his chin into the guitar and squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

"He... you fought people. Threatened people. Scared..." She almost gave herself away. "Scared people."

"I was sick," he said sadly. "He hurt me."

"You were already hurting. He didn't hurt you. You hurt yourself a long time before John Train showed up."

He screwed up his face as if he were going to cry.

"All right, we'll set Train aside for now. What about you? You did kill yourself, yes? John Train had nothing to do with that."

"He was long gone."

"Yes."

He strummed the open strings.

"So it was you who hurt yourself. You were the one who hung yourself. It wasn't murder. It was suicide."

"I don't want to talk about it."

"It's a little too late for that. Now, how was it? You were at your sister's place when it happened. You had a rope."

"I said I don't want to..."

"Or no, it wasn't a rope. It was the belt, wasn't it? The belt to your bathrobe. You took the belt and you put it around your neck."

"I don't want to."

"You put it around your neck and you tied it to the door and you hung yourself."

He rocked slowly back and forth in the chair. That motion was his, not Train's. "Please..."

"And you know? Maybe you could have been forgiven that. You'd been miserable a long time. Job asked God for death, right?"

"He hurt me. I was hurt."

"So, sure, maybe after your stay here you could go where it is you really want to go. But you know who found you?"

He looked up at her. She knew he didn't. She knew none of them ever saw what happened after they breathed for the last time.

"Your sister. Your poor sweet sister, never hurt a soul."

She saw thick hot tears spill down his cheeks.

"She let you stay when all you could do was lay there and play cards and moan and groan, and that's how you repaid her. By letting her walk in on you like that."

He was crying silently.

"So when I ask you this, know that I really do want to hear the truth. Why? Why did you do it?"

He didn't answer and her anger flooded through her in a massive wave. She waved a hand and dissolved the guitar, his little comfort object, into thin air. He held out both hands, palms up, then ran them through his hair, knocking the hat back and she saw that he was staring down at the floor.

"Look at me," she told him.

He raised his head but not his eyes.

"I said look at me."

He opened his eyes. He looked at her but his eyes were glassy and distant.

"You don't recognize me, do you."

He shook his head.

She turned up the lights and stood and leaned over the table to let him get a good look at her. Still he said nothing and she finally said, "I'm your daughter, you son of a bitch."

For another moment he looked blank and then his entire body crumbled. He wrapped his arms around himself and looked back down to the floor.

"I'm your daughter," she heard herself say again. "And I want to know. What was it that kept you from staying with me?"

"I was sick. I was sick, I couldn't take it any more."

"I get that. Trust me, I get that. But I want to know why you didn't have the guts to tell me to my face that you weren't going to stick around."

He looked as if he were going to be sick but she felt sick too, sick with anger.

"Are you listening to me? I said I want to know, damn it."

He shook his head again and again. "I was so, so sick."

She looked at him and she wanted to scream. "Please tell me this, at least. How did you think I was going to feel?"

He looked so lost, feeling for the guitar that wasn't there. "I... I wasn't. I wasn't thinking about that."

She didn't know what she expected. She didn't know what she wanted. But whatever it was she was looking, he didn't have it to give.

Even here, in as perfect a world as you could hope for, he had nothing for her. Wasn't his fault. And it wasn't hers.

She sat back down and closed the book. There was no point knocking. There was nobody home. And it wasn't her fault.

It wasn't her fault.

She should have known. How many other suicides had she seen? They didn't care what it said in the Catechism, that suicide was "gravely contrary to the just love of self." That assumed you loved yourself to begin with--what a joke.

She looked at him and once again, just like she had when she was thirteen, she felt sorry for him. She let the guitar come back from the ether and he grabbed it and held it tight to his chest.

"Okay," she said. "I'm going to let you go."

He looked weak with relief.

"But I want something from you first. I want... I want you to play me a song."

That was the right thing to ask. That was the one thing he could reliably give her.

And, this time, he did.


End file.
